Generally, in aircraft, the failure reports of an aircraft aim to establish, in a centralized manner or, more specifically, on an item of equipment, a statement of the failures or anomalies arising in a flight context, such as external conditions (temperature, pressure, altitude) or data specific to an item of equipment or to a plurality of items of equipment.
In general, the failures of the various items of equipment are diagnosed and stored by test functions available in each item of equipment.
In aeronautics in particular, some items of equipment have a so-called built-in test equipment (BITE) function. This function is used to establish diagnoses and communicate them to a centralized maintenance system of the aircraft comprising a centralized computer. The centralized computer can notably be a computer known as a centralized fault display interface unit (CFDIU) or, alternatively, central maintenance computer (CMC).
The centralized computer is responsible for establishing the summary of the failures for the entire aircraft and providing an interface for a post-diagnosis for maintenance operators.
To this end, the centralized computer drafts a post-flight report (PFR). This report comprises the summary of the failure messages or alarms transmitted by the various items of equipment or systems in the aircraft. These failure messages or alarms are generally associated with a certain quantity of data such as the date, the time, the flight phase for example.
Based on this report, the maintenance operator decides to remove the items of equipment that need a repair or to investigate further or to keep the item of equipment in its environment.
One drawback of current failure reports, regarding items of equipment that require further investigation, is that they do not include contextual information, notably as to their use or their environment upon the detection and sending of alarms or failure messages.
The a posteriori diagnoses or analyses are thus generally limited and do not make it possible to correctly analyse the causality links underlying the occurrence of failures during flight.